Jack Conte and Dave Rubin dissect Patreon's removal of Lauren Southern, clarifying that the ban stemmed from her crew physically blocking an NGO ship rather than ideological disagreement. Conte emphasizes "manifest observable behavior" over intent, rejecting claims of external lobbying while admitting procedural gaps that will soon include an appeals process. The discussion contrasts Patreon's advertiser-free model with YouTube's constraints, arguing that direct creator support sustains free speech. Ultimately, the episode suggests that community funding can mitigate systemic fears without compromising safety standards. [Automatically generated summary]
As you guys know, this show is fan-funded by you, the audience, through the crowdfunding platform Patreon.
Thanks to those of you who support what we do on Patreon, this show is not only independent, But we've built a totally professional home studio and have 100% control over all the content that we create for you every week.
There is literally nothing between me and you because Patreon has given us the tools to create a business behind the show, one of which I'm incredibly proud of.
The Patreon platform has enabled us to grow and expand the show, but also, and perhaps more importantly, allowed us to build an incredible community of people who care about free speech, And having thought-provoking and honest conversations.
As most of you know at this point, last week Patreon deleted the account of former guest of the Rubin Report Lauren Southern.
Many of you expressed frustration with Patreon, and we lost about 200 patrons and over $1,000 a month in support because people no longer wanted to support Patreon.
We've made some of that money back on PayPal, but that's totally besides the point.
As I said in a Patreon exclusive post that I put up last week, I'll respect any of your decisions related to your hard-earned money, and at the same time, Patreon itself is a private company and it can do whatever it deems best for its business.
At the same time, as a creator, but also as a consumer, I often find myself incredibly
frustrated with many of the platforms I use and the general lack of transparency from
these new media monoliths is becoming an increasing problem.
To Patreon's credit, their CEO Jack Conte called me and about half a dozen other creators
personally to explain the decision to remove Lauren's account.
During that call, which was just a couple days ago last Thursday, I asked Jack to come
on The Rubin Report to discuss Loren's ban and the company's commitment to free speech.
Jack immediately responded that he would love to come on and discuss this, which is something that CEOs of these companies pretty much never do.
I suspect that the conversation that we're about to have will be the nexus of so many of the issues that we talk about here every week, from free speech to new media, to silencing of dissent, to public versus private utilities, and much more.
With that in mind, I welcome Patreon CEO Jack Conte to The Rubin Report.
I normally don't do live preludes, but there you go.
All right, so we have a lot to talk about and, you know, I always say at the end of my interviews that I think a good interview is when I don't look at my notes once.
Today, though, I am going to have to look because there's a lot of things we got to get to.
So a lot of people were saying, were first asking me, well how did this come to your attention?
So this is one of the things that I asked.
So we talked for about 20 minutes, just in photo transparency.
And we just met for another two minutes right here.
But that was one of the things that a lot of people were asking, well, how did this get to your attention?
So there seems to be a little confusion as to whether this was bumped up by people complaining to you, meaning just patrons or just people outside of Patreon.
So I'm going to sound probably a little dumb here, but I actually hadn't even heard of this hope not hate lobby thing until someone, I think I saw a tweet about it, maybe Saturday or Sunday.
I didn't even know that people were accusing them of having lobbied for this.
And I know very little about that organization.
So I can tell you how things get bumped up in our system.
We start seeing an influx of reports about something.
We saw the same with IGD.
Suddenly there was this massive influx of reports about IGD.
The same thing started happening with Lauren.
And as, like, more and more reports start coming in, the urgency of that thing starts to get intense,
As more and more reports start coming in, the urgency of that thing starts to get intense,
especially if the complaints coming in are, like, giving detailed evidence or have screenshots.
especially if the complaints coming in are giving detailed evidence or have screenshots.
Or I mentioned in this video, there's this concept called manifest observable behavior
I mentioned in this video, there's this concept called manifest observable behavior
that makes it a little easier if somebody has done something
that makes it a little easier if somebody has done something
that's literally trackable, traceable.
There's a tweet of it, there's a screenshot, there's a video.
And when we start getting a lot of those sorts of reports, the team will escalate the thing and make a decision.
So that's exactly what happened.
And then, when was it, two weeks ago that we made the decision to take the page down?
Yeah, in our content policy when we talk about how to scale the team and how to make a good decision, how to make sure that you're not making decisions based on ideology or other things, we use this term manifest observable behavior.
And really what it means is, look, you don't know a person's intention, right?
You don't know what their motivation is.
If someone says, I am going to burn down the DMV.
And then they make a video of themselves burning down a building and then they, uh, you know, uh...
Whatever.
They raise money and they buy gas and matches.
Those things add up and you can see the campaign to raise money, you can see the threat in Twitter, you can see the statements from the person, you can see a video of them burning down another building practicing.
Those are all examples of manifest, observable behavior.
Here's a person who has burned down a practice building, they have made a threat, and they add up to what we would call a credible threat.
Right, so I think a lot of people would hear that example and say, okay, that's a pretty concrete example.
What I'm hearing from a lot of Lauren's people is that what happened with these boats, that A, there's an argument to be made that what these boats are doing is illegal, that they're not actually rescuing people, that these are actually migrant boats that are in effect doing something illegal by bringing people across borders that they're not supposed to, and that she herself never used any of her money Yeah.
And I'm happy to have a discussion about, like, who is a refugee and who is a migrant and who gets to make that decision and what is to be done about it.
I want to separate that discussion from content policy, because it turns out they're very different things.
Content policy is about manifest, observable behavior.
Who is a migrant and who is a refugee is a separate discussion that actually has nothing to do with content policy.
And then your other question, so let's talk about that.
Your other question specifically was about, what was it?
So it's defined in great detail in the policy, in terms of certain things that are allowed, certain things that are not allowed.
But the point is, there's this section of the content policy that specifically mandates the things that you can do and can't do on Patreon, the platform itself.
Not like on Twitter, but on Patreon the platform itself.
The second section is you can't do it no matter where you're doing it, as long as you're a creator on Patreon.
In other words, if you are committing money laundering somewhere else, but you're using Patreon to fund your weekly flute music, It doesn't matter that you're not using your funds that you're making on Patreon for your money laundering operation or for your, like if you've got a weapons and bombs manufacturing facility.
I think actually most of the things are probably illegal, like violent crime, and there's property crime, and there's other things in that section of the content policy.
But no, there is a strict separation between law and content policy.
Those are also different discussions.
So it's not always illegal things.
Sometimes it's just things that we don't want on Patreon, like pornography.
Yeah, and at the end of the day, that's the way we think about it, which again is why we distinguish between law and content policy.
They really are different discussions.
The third section of the content policy is like, look, even if you're not doing it now, you can't ever have done these things and be a creator on Patreon.
And that's things like terrorism and cybercrime, etc.
Yeah, so I don't wanna whittle down too much with the migrant versus immigrant versus refugee thing because A, as you're saying, this is a separate issue.
You guys have your policies that are not legal policies for a nation.
But I do think there's something important here because what I'm hearing from a lot of these people, as I said, is that these ships are not doing exactly what it sounded like you were saying in the video, that they actually are transporting, intentionally transporting migrants So in effect, they're doing something illegal, and the Defend Europe people are actually defending the borders of Europe, so to speak.
I'm just laying out the case.
I'm not even saying whether I agree with that or not.
And by the way, it sounds very all over the place with that.
It sounds like some of them are actual refugees, some of them are migrants, et cetera, et cetera.
But you're saying that, is that completely irrelevant in this?
Yeah, it actually has nothing to do with the content quality decision, and I can explain why.
So, let's say a person on Patreon blocks an ambulance.
Okay.
Can't do that.
But then somebody could say, well, that ambulance was on its way to pick up person X, who we know is a convicted felon, and did something, and then they lay out something really horrible that that person has done.
Does that make it, like, let's say it's a terrible person that that ambulance was about to save.
Let's say they're about to save whoever.
It's like, think of the worst person in the world that they're about to save.
A lot of the people in the audience are thinking of me right now.
Okay, so let's say, like, that person was about to save Jack Conte.
So you could say, okay, well, they've blocked the ambulance.
Now you could say, well, the ambulance was going to pick up a terrible person anyway, so it's okay that they blocked the ambulance in this particular case.
No, you can't say that.
Because now Patreon is suddenly in the business of investigating truths based on opinions on this migrant and refugee issue.
There are papers published from universities and organizations on both sides of the issue, like, okay, what percentage of the people are actually, you know, like, legitimate refugees?
And then there's also international law, which says, like, look, anyone who's seeking asylum is considered an asylum seeker and is given, like, certain international rights, etc.
Had those videos that Lauren created been exactly the same, but had she just not said to the, it sounds like she said to the captain, to the ship, or whoever was in charge, get in front, get in front.
It was a little unclear to me, did she mean get in front so that she could videotape more or whatever?
So I think there's a little bit of language stuff there.
But is what you're saying that had she not said any of that, any sort of direction to these people, but just been on board, you know, recording what was happening, that this wouldn't have happened?
And by the way, it is very, very clear to me, if you watch the video again, she's not saying, like, get in front of the ship so I can film more.
She literally says, get in front, get in front, they have to stop.
Like, legally, they have to stop if we're in front of the boat.
It's very clear, like, what she's saying, what she's instructing the boat operator to do.
If they're on the side of the boat with signs waving and screaming and yelling and exercising their right to speak, awesome.
You can have a Patreon page.
But, you know, and you can do the same with a hospital.
You stand outside a hospital, say whatever you want to say.
We're not going to stop you from doing that.
There are other things that Lauren has done that, like, hey, we're not going to stop her from doing those things, even though, like, me personally, I disagree with some of those things, but I'm not going to stop her from doing those things.
And in this particular case, like the second you actually turn that speech into action, that's the line in our content policy.
So yeah, I mean literally it has to do with the fact that she instructed the boat operator to pull their boat in front of theirs.
like I'm pretty sure that regardless of your own political opinion,
you would admit that, you know, tech companies and Silicon Valley
and San Francisco and all that, it leans pretty far left,
it leans pretty far progressive and all that.
And I think one of the reasons that Patreon is so successful is that you guys have become the sort of refuge for a lot of the people that feel like we're being treated unfairly on those things, where my videos don't get monetized on YouTube, They're unclear about the algorithm, you know, I see people being unsubscribed all the time, all that.
And I think partly what a lot of your creators are fearing now is that mob rule, mob meaning a big group of people, but also this acronym here, will just sort of kick in.
That eventually, that Lauren, although this may be completely within the lines of what you guys have set out, that It will just eventually get to a place where anyone who's doing anything, it'll just get kicked up enough and that you'll just be under pressure, sort of that the dam has broke already.
And anybody who's watching who's worried about that.
Yeah, we're just, it's a different system.
The reason this is happening on these other platforms is because of pressure from advertisers, right?
All of their dollars are coming from advertisers.
And advertisers are very picky around what type of content they want to run their ads against.
When you have, right, in all these other media companies, the stakeholders are viewer, fan, employee, investor, shareholder, advertiser.
Adding an advertiser to that list of stakeholders completely changes the nuance and organization of the ecosystem.
And it changes the stakes of the ecosystem.
And it changes the content itself, unfortunately.
That's one of the things that Patreon is fighting.
I hate the fact that literally my videos on YouTube, somebody who has nothing to do with my relationship with my fans or the platform itself, gets to It gets to decide whether or not I make money on these videos or not.
That sucks for me.
I hate that.
And so we have completely removed advertisers from the model itself, right?
Advertisers are not stakeholders in the Patreon ecosystem.
If they're scared about this particular type of content or that particular type of content, it doesn't matter.
They can pull their ads on YouTube, they have zero effect on the content on Patreon.
That's really important to us and it'll stay that way.
The answer to that question is, again, I think relatively simple, but then if you dive into it, It's not.
The answer is Patreon has a mission, right?
We have a purpose for existing.
Law has a mission too.
Law's purpose is different than Patreon's purpose.
And so we need a different set of rules to govern our mission and to describe and to propel our mission forward.
And so we've developed a set of rules that propel our mission.
And again, it's not that it's counter to law.
It's literally just like a little bit, you know, it's a little bit of a different direction.
Like, for example, pornography.
I don't want porn on Patreon.
And again, it's not that I think porn should be illegal, or I don't think people should be looking at porn.
It's just that that's not Patreon's mission.
And so if we have porn on Patreon, it changes the egos.
It changes the entire ecosystem, right?
People start to think of Patreon as a porn site if there's too much porn on Patreon.
And then suddenly folks like you and others think, ah, I don't want to use Patreon.
And that hurts our mission, right?
Because we start turning away the kinds of creators that we want to be on the platform.
So it turns out, like, you have to have some set of rules to govern your ecosystem that are effectively a model of your mission, your purpose for existence.
And these are the rules that describe the mission that we have.
Do you think that there's some sort of slippery slope aspect to this words and action thing?
Because it's one of the things that I've been talking about for a while here, which is that if you keep labeling everyone Nazis, and then you're okay with punching Nazis, then you can blow up a Nazis car.
We've created something here, and I say this because I know for many of the people that I've had on this show, The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, has listed people that I'm now friends with and know well, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Majid Nawaz and Brigitte Gabriel, anti-Muslim extremists.
These people could not be... Majid himself is Muslim.
Ayaan was born Muslim.
I mean, these people could not be anything further from that.
But I could see a situation where one of them perhaps would try to get on Patreon, Your team would do a little digging and go, well, they did say this and then there was some violence, not that they called directly for violence, but that slippery slope part of that, how cognizant are you of that?
We're not gonna look at an article- Do you not at all, because there were a couple of pretty terrible articles written about me that talked about Patreon as well.
Mother Jones wrote a really awful libelous piece about me, further to the right than Breitbart or something, Der Spiegel.
And they, by the way, in both cases mentioned Patreon.
Like most creators, like creators watching this, You just don't have to worry about this shit.
You just don't have to worry about it.
Like, people like you and people, most people who are, like, engaging in healthy dialogue and talking about tough issues, like, this is just not something that concerns most creators.
And it, like, kills me a little bit that there's this fear.
You know, one of the things Sam Harris said in the podcast where he talked about leaving Patreon
was like, there's this wave of de-platformings.
And it kills me that there's that fear there and it doesn't have to be there for most creators.
Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that the fear is overblown.
The fear is legitimate and real.
What kills me about it is that people are starting to, like, that Sam was worried about.
One of the questions you asked me on the phone was like, hey, if I bring someone on the show that you guys don't agree with, like, is my show at risk?
That's what kills me.
The answer is a resounding no.
Your show is not at risk.
Talking about issues, again, I can't stress how important that is.
The difference between pulling your ship in front of another ship and what we're doing here in this room or what you do with any person who's of any particular opinion in this room.
So for the record, you did say to me, I just want it so that this is out on YouTube forever.
You said to me, my channel, not to make this about me, but that my channel has 0% chance of being deleted.
I think you said something very similar to my friend Colin Moriarty, and I suspect you probably said it to a couple people, other people that I don't know.
Yeah, do you think there's some sort of inherent risk, though, about partly what we do with our money once we put that money into action?
So, for example, if I was funding gay people getting out of Saudi Arabia, let's say, which I suspect would probably be something that you, Jack Conte, were probably before, or I was funding, you know, free speech activists, bloggers in Bangladesh or something, Now that's an action that I'd be putting, using the money that I created here.
I think in those two cases you would be for those actions, so it wouldn't be a problem.
But there could be a situation, I can't think of one off the top of my head, that I might want to put money behind something that you wouldn't be thrilled with.
I don't mean you as the company, I don't mean Jack.
I love to talk about examples, but when we're gonna talk about examples, we have to be ultra-specific to really figure out if this is something that is or isn't against the content policy, right?
Because the content policy is long, and there's a lot of things.
So just to whittle it down a little bit, let's use the example.
If I was funding or helping somehow, or becoming an activist in an organization that was helping gay people get out of Saudi Arabia, Let's use that one as just the straight-up example.
That's why we base everything on manifest observable behavior, so we don't have to, like, because otherwise you literally can't deal with those sorts of issues, unless you have the tweet from the person that says, I'm going to bomb this building in order to accomplish my
mission or whatever, then we've got a credible threat and we take action.
But if somebody is not breaking the content policy, then it doesn't matter what you're trying to do.
Of course you can take action, as long as none of those actions are against things that
are in the content policy.
Sorry, I sound a little bit like I'm a broken record here.
Yeah, I don't think I'm going to get hate from CEOs.
I think the one thing that I actually really appreciate about the culture in Silicon Valley is...
Despite the fact that I think people could do more to be transparent, a lot more to be transparent with communities and users, people are very transparent with each other.
There's a lot of sharing and a lot of discussion and dialogue.
CEOs are constantly helping each other out.
So I will frequently call up other CEOs and ask them questions.
And it's amazing.
It's so different.
Because right before this, I was in the music industry for 10 years.
You are alone on an island in the music industry.
I felt isolated from other folks.
If you want to figure out how much you pay a guitar player when you go on tour with them, what's a good weekly rate to pay a guitar player?
It's freaking tough to answer that question if you're an independent musician.
I mean, you've got to call a lot of people, there's no data, it's not organized.
If you want to figure out, you know, how much do you pay this kind of employee, whatever, a designer or an engineer that has like three years of experience and has worked at these companies, There are so many public databases that organize compensation data for employees, and it becomes actually a very solvable problem to figure out how much do you pay employees.
And that has to do with companies just being willing and open to share with each other.
So I'd say one of the main things about the culture is discussion.
So for that reason, I do not think I'm going to get a lot of hate from CEOs.
I think people will talk about this, and it'll just be something that people discuss and share with each other.
All right, we got away from Patreon specifically for a second.
I was giving you a minute there to go macro on it.
So for the people that get what you're saying about manifest observable behavior, they get what I'm saying about sort of the slippery slope of all of this.
I think there's going to be a certain amount of people that no matter what you say are gonna say, wait, the dam broke here, now he, One day, you're going to get protested by a certain amount of people.
You know what I mean?
They're gonna start looking at your creators, whether they've done anything or not.
I think it's a good, rigorous, solid content policy.
Personally, I spent like two months building this policy with an expert who had literally scaled a trust and safety team to like a massive operation with lots of people working on this stuff and literally was like training computers on how to automatically identify Some awful things that are like should not be okay.
Child pornography, etc.
And was literally like training algorithms to identify this kind of stuff.
This person was an absolute expert in content policy.
I feel really, really good about this policy.
I think, like anything, content policy is going to change and adopt over time.
So what I'm not going to say is like, hey, our content policy is going to be exactly the same five years from now.
That's just not true.
What I can say is that I think, personally, I want to build a platform.
I want Patreon to be a company that values free speech, that values creators, that wants to pay creators, that wants to put people in that mission, that wants to put people in that world where they're making money and where they can buy a studio like this.
That's what's important to me.
And again, it comes down to the things that you're doing.
If you're gonna take action that's gonna hurt a person, we're just not gonna be okay with that.
So one of the things that you addressed in the video that you put up is that the way you guys went about doing this may have been a little sloppy, or perhaps not the best way of doing it.
That you deleted her channel, there was no chance of recourse or anything like that.
Well, let's say just right now, if she accepted that, okay, by the end of the year, they're gonna take care of this stuff.
But in the meantime, since she happens to be the person that's going through this right now, if she was to contact you directly or the team or whatever and say, you know what, I hear what you're saying about these specific videos, I will take these videos down and I won't do that again.
Is there any chance that there would be a special conversation about her?
Because that's the one that this is really all about, I guess is what I'm saying.
Right, so removing the strictly illegal people up to illegal activities, removing those people.
Somebody that happens to be controversial, someone who I expect from looking at your Twitter that you probably are not a big fan of, let's say someone like Milo, would that set off any bells internally as to can we even go about doing this?
Because the same people that really don't like Lauren, or the same people that like Lauren, like Milo, obviously.
Again, what I would say is, and see here's the other thing I think people don't understand about these sorts of decisions.
I don't, this is not my job, right?
I don't do our content policy.
Our team does our content policy.
So if there were, here's what I would say, if there were lots of incoming reports, they would look at a bunch of evidence, they'd make a determination, and they'd make a decision one way or the other after we like investigated it thoroughly.
I don't know.
And I'd like to sit here and be able to say I know all the answers, I have everything, but the truth is I don't.
We have to look at it, see if there's any manifest observable behavior that's against the content policy.
So the other page that you took down a couple days after this was this It's Going Down page, which is connected to either directly or loosely with Antifa.
So first off, a lot of people were saying to me, you see what they did there?
They took Lauren down and now they're just throwing us a bone by taking that one down.
Now I would argue that's not really throwing anyone a bone because having more things taken off the platform isn't What I personally would want, obviously it's not up to me, were these things happening in conjunction?
Was it a response where you were just trying to save face or whatever else?
So, I actually personally looked into this, because it was important to me.
I personally looked into this whole thing, but that very issue in particular, turns out that page was in the queue, in the trust and safety queue, before we even took down Lauren's page.
So, like, the people saying that, like, oh, this is just a response, and they're just trying to cover their ass, and blah, blah, blah, it's actually just not true.
But the thing is, the team, what do we have, like, right now there's about three people on the team, right?
So there's, they have a queue of pages.
It is very often, like, it happens all the time where they'll, like, look at a page, and then they'll look at another page, and look at another page, and we'll take down pages, you know, two weeks, three weeks apart, like, We don't batch pages all together that are like politically, you know, opposing and take them down at the same time to like seem like we're being fair.
Like, that's not how we do things.
We take them down in an order.
So folks who are saying that like, oh, we happen to take this page down right at the right moment, that means that they're just trying to cover their ass.
So I told the audience that we were gonna do a Q&A via Patreon and in Super Chat.
I wanna get to that.
I also know that you have to get back.
You agreed to do this in basically no time.
Literally, you didn't pause when I asked you to do this.
I want my audience to know that, because that is not something that happens often.
Basically, it never happens.
So we're gonna take literally a 30-second break, and then we're gonna jump into audience questions.
So the last thing I wanna ask you before that, though, is what would be your last pitch for the 200-so people that have canceled my page?
So I'm taking a brunt of this.
I mean, I took a financial hit.
It's over $1,000 a month.
As I said, we made some of that back on PayPal.
It's irrelevant.
To the purposes of this conversation, it's completely irrelevant.
But for those people, I don't know if you know what your internal numbers are and I'm sure you're not allowed to share them anyway, but for the people that you've now lost that you wanna get back, what would be your closing statement in why you think you did the right thing and why they can have their trust put back in Patreon?
Then we'll take a quick break and then we'll get to the audience questions.
Yeah, I'd just say that, and this is just like a matter of belief, like, if you don't believe us, fine.
But this isn't for the people, like, over here who don't believe us.
This is for the people who, like, who maybe think that some people in the world are good.
We are so rigorous and thoughtful about this kind of stuff.
We had the whole executive team looking at this.
We had the entire trust and safety team stringing together tons and tons of evidence.
We spent a lot of hours on this.
We will continue to be extra rigorous, extra thoughtful, extra careful around these issues.
I think we are so much more careful and thoughtful than other companies in dealing with these issues.
And certainly than people, I think, give us credit for based on some of the comments about us just doing things on a whim.
So, I guess my pitch would be like, look, there's a lot of smart people that are thinking very, very hard about this and making good, thoughtful, rigorous, evidence-based decisions.
That's it.
I mean, at the end of the day, like, you know, it comes down to like, is this something that you You know, is this something where you're just, you know, you can't see it, you can't agree, you can't trust, you assume people are bad?
Or is this something where you actually think like, look, people are working hard to try and make this really fair.
And that's what I can tell you.
We are working very, very hard to try and make this fair.
And I would be remiss if I had you sitting here and I was able to look you in the eyes and didn't say that I want this to work.
As badly as you want this to work, I want this to work.
The thing that you created literally changed my life.
You're sitting in evidence of that.
So I want this to work.
It's why I wanted to have this conversation.
As I said to you right before we started, some people are gonna be more angry at me for whatever reason, some people will be more angry at you, and that's all just, it is what it is.
But I hope we've given them a little bit of taste of that, Things are kind of complex, and we'll go from there.
But before I even bother saying anything else, we're gonna take literally a 30-second break.
I'm gonna refill Jack's water, and then Patreon questions, which we've already got roughly four billion of them, and we'll jump into Super Chat as well.
30 seconds!
I know I usually say a minute, and it takes three minutes.
All right, so from Patreon, and I think some of these are gonna be a little bit repetitive, but they might at least give you a chance to specify a couple of things.
A question about transparency.
Will you in the future be more upfront with providing the evidence behind your decisions as well as allowing the creator that you're looking at to voice their own defense?
So I think we know the answer to the voice of their own defense, because you will put in this policy of allowing them to discuss it.
But what about being transparent about laying out the case for the patrons?
Okay, I'm glad someone asked this on Patreon because I think it's a better version
of the question that I asked you.
So I asked you about, well, what if I was helping get gay people
out of Saudi Arabia, which I'm sure you would probably agree is okay
and that most people would agree with.
But this is, I think, a more specific point, which is, if a Patreon creator spends the funds promoting free speech and democracy in China, and that activity is illegal in China, would Patreon deplatform the creator?
So I think that's actually a better way of phrasing the question than I asked.
If you violate a law in a country that is not the United States, but you violate a local law somewhere else, I actually don't think we have anything in our content policy about that right now.
Maybe we should, but we don't.
So yeah, violating local laws in international territories.
I think when we start internationalizing more and we change currencies and we allow for localization of language and stuff like that, we'll probably have to start getting into those sorts of issues.
But right now, I don't think there's anything in our content policy about violating local laws.
So basically, if I wanna start funding democracy in China, I better do it quick because, I mean, the truth is that once you guys start having those conversations, that's where the lawyers get involved, then there are connections.
I mean, I think the other fear that a lot of my audience has is that there are so many connections these days between politicians and the heads of all of these companies.
That certainly exists, although I don't think it really is as political as a lot of people think.
I think, honestly, it comes down to advertising and making sure that the platforms When YouTube makes a decision to demonetize a particular video, I think that sucks, and I'm sad that the ecosystem works that way.
If you look at actually what happened to YouTube, advertisers pulled out, right?
Because they didn't want their ads against a particular type of content.
YouTube had their hand forced at that point to basically make the system more friendly to advertisers, which unfortunately means more demonetization for creators.
But that's not a political issue.
That's not because they have ties to this particular government or that particular politician.
It's because advertisers are paying them and responsible for most of their revenue and don't want their ads run against those videos.
Well, that it's strongly misguided because A, first off, on YouTube especially, no one associates the ad as an endorsement of the content, ever.
It's just never happened.
But then even beyond just the general, you know, there's less inventory, so I understand that at a business level, but we do videos where we talk about free speech and we talk about dissent or religion and things like that.
Those videos, it's not that they're being demonetized, they're not even getting monetized in the first place.
So there's several problems there, but I know you're not a representative of YouTube.
Question for Jack, the complaint about these non-government ships
is that they are rescuing people and taking them over to Italy.
It's a clear loophole in immigration.
Is there any acknowledgement that this is what the groups are opposing, not specifically the rescuing?
So that's sort of where we started this whole thing out.
The very issue here seems to be, depending on which way you look at it, either these ships are rescuing people or they're actually taking part in something that's illegal in the first place.
Yeah, so again, I'm going to separate content policy from discussions of, like, who is and is not a refugee.
If you want to have that discussion again, happy to do it.
I would say for that particular issue, there are international laws around who is and isn't a refugee.
It's in the 1951 Refugee Convention that like over 145 countries have entered into.
And it's a legally binding international document.
I think one of the difficulties with that document is it doesn't lay out accountability
procedures around it.
So if you violate the laws in this treaty, nothing happens to you, which is kind of a
bad system in and of itself.
But yeah, the people who are saying like, oh, these people are not refugees, they're
immigrants, you know, technically there's due process to decide who is who.
And so these international conventions lay out what that due process is.
If you wish, literally, if you wish to be determined, if you wish to have your status determined as a refugee, then you're guaranteed certain rights as an asylum seeker.
Here's the thing with organizations where people people People assume and I think wrongfully so Like anyone on Patreon is allowed to interview or express support or talk about or you're allowed to talk, right?
We're not going to stop you from talking.
We're not going to stop you from interviewing anybody on this show.
But as soon as you put up a page and raise money to do bad things that are against the content policy, that's when we'll take your page down.
So I would say to that person, like, send us the page that is violating our content policy.
Send us the page that you think, like, and send us the tweet, the screenshot, from that particular creator who did that particular wrong thing.
But if you're gonna get into, like, this organization, this person interviewed them, and then that person interviewed this person and tied their support to blah blah, it's like, Send us the behavior.
Unless you're very clear with what the behavior is, then it just doesn't work.
You have to be ultra, ultra specific with content policy.
So to be clear, if there was a Black Lives Matter page that absolutely was calling for violence or do anything close to what IGD was doing or any of that, they would be under the same type of scrutiny?
Can you ask Jack about Sargon of Akkad and why he was looked at but Anita Sarkeesian was not looked into for her providing false information about him?
Again, with these, I think a lot of the questions that we're starting to get, a lot of the questions that we've gotten so far are like, is does this violate your policy? Does that violate your
policy? And I understand that people really want specificity over that,
which is one of the reasons that like the trust and safety team is going to work very hard to make our
policy a lot more clear and transparent to the community.
For those particular questions, does this violate your policy? Does that violate your policy?
You can't, you literally can't answer those questions without getting ultra, ultra specific.
In order to answer that question, our team builds like 10 page reports about whether or not there's a policy violation.
And it requires just so much evidence and rigor and detail.
So like a question that's asked in one sentence, you literally can't get to the bottom of it.
We had a discussion about that for quite a long time, but basically our thought was like, look, while you were exercising your right to free speech and you were doing what is okay according to the guidelines and according to the law, something bad happened, But in these cases where they know that they're putting people out in the middle of the street, which is illegal, or they're stopping other parades from, you know, they're stopping the gay pride parade in Toronto until they sign, you know, basically extorting them until they sign their, you know, charter on, we're gonna, you know, go with you on all of these specific points.
That's a little different than someone accidentally falling and hurting their head.
If you were to show a creator who had pulled their car in front of an ambulance, that creator, not like a creator who had interviewed an organization who did something like that, but if the creator themselves pulled their car in front of an ambulance, we would take that creator down no matter what organization they're a part of.
So on the speech versus action part, If you had a creator who was saying, okay, I'm going to this event, one of the things you can do is pull your car in front of a police car to be there.
And you've got creators with millions of fans getting paid a few hundred bucks a month.
That sucks.
I still can't believe the internet has made it this far.
And you've got a person who's improving the lives of a million people and getting 20,000 people a month reading their blog or watching their videos or reading their articles.
And that person gets paid 300 bucks a month in ad revenue.
That makes my heart hurt.
I can't believe that we've allowed this to happen.
The systemic abuse of creative people is...
Demoralizing to me.
And there are 80 people in San Francisco who get up every morning and want to change that.
Want to fix that.
And people in the world can change that and they can fix that by supporting creators on Patreon.
By giving 10 bucks a month, 5 bucks a month to do a little part and to change the way the system works.
So yeah, do it because it's the right thing to do because the world would suck without creators.
And because, you know, while art is now free, while videos are free, while music is free, that's not a question anymore, right?
Creators aren't free, right?
This studio isn't free.
It's so important that people realize that and take their part to change that.